The New Egg

Leave your morals at home.

There’s been a lot of talk about a scientific paper from Italy purporting to make the perfect boiled egg using the periodic method. The methodology described uses two pots and takes 32 minutes to complete. The reason for such complications are because the white of the egg cooks at around 85°C, while the yolk cooks at around 65°C. It's this difference that generally has flummoxed many a home cook. Over a decade ago the sous vide technique lead to the 50-minute egg and became the new standard of eggy perfection. Neither of these methods compare with my Sunday ritual that requires four pots set at three different temperatures and takes six to eight hours, depending on your elevation above or below sea level.

Read more »

Adopting Hedonically 

Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) in the film, Perfect Days by Wim Wenders.

Hedonic Adaptation
As I understand it, "hedonic adaptation" is how we return to our normal level of happiness (or lack of it). If you don’t struggle with mania or depression I suppose you’re considered pretty “level” - I think most of us are. What’s interesting is whether you win the lottery or have to pay a huge tax bill, the happiness or sadness caused by the event doesn’t last and you eventually return to whatever is normal for you.

Something that apparently has a positive impact is simply saying to yourself, ”These are the good days.”, which really reminds me of Wim Wenders' recent film, Perfect Days. In that film, Hirayama, the story's protagonist, is content with a simple life and a simple job and seems to greet every morning with an expression that beams from his face that says, "These are the good days."

A few weekends ago really did feel like the good days. Let me begin by saying that my job lately has been challenging. A re-org meant a project that I’ve been a part of for about four years fell apart and was cancelled, impacting hundreds of people. Fortunately, it appears that my team was saved from the indignity of layoffs. Unfortunately whatever will replace that project is ill-defined leaving us with a lot of spare time to worry. I’ve been in this spot before and have been filling my suddenly empty schedule with training courses and, if I’m being honest, daydreaming. Daydreaming leads to stepping out in some unexpectedly warm weather for wandering.
Read more »

So far, so good. 

Who wants to live longer?

American comedian Steven Wright once joked, "I plan to live forever." When asked how it was going he answered, "So far, so good."

I just read a book, Outlive by Peter Attia - (pronounced Ahh-tia) that recommends a healthy non-diabetic person should go out, purchase and use the kind of glucose monitoring system diabetics use all the time and monitor their blood glucose levels for two to three months. The idea behind it is sound. You will spend a month gathering and monitoring the data and the next month or two analyzing exactly what foods cause glucose spikes for you as an individual. Again, this is probably sound science and would be interesting to know. The point is to find out which foods affect you rather than relying on some general aggregated data about the general population. Good advice, but the same book argues that recommending very strict diets doesn't work because people can't stick to them, usually due to hunger or generally not feeling sated, like that feeling of having an apple and not feeling like you ate anything at all. Yet, the same book expects you to stick to a diabetic's level of glucose monitoring despite not having diabetes.

This is one of the problems with the book and its recommendations. You should eat healthily for you by finding out what foods affect you the most by carefully monitoring your glucose levels. You should exercise more, but very specifically training for strength, stability, flexibility and endurance by following peculiarly specific instructions. Attia gives very detailed data and instructions for following the data analysis, which is well beyond what anyone could do without a team normally reserved for professional athletes. Essentially he eschews taking a kind of moderate approach for something unusually complex, all to live longer and to better avoid the "four horsemen" of old age; cancer, heart disease, metabolic diseases such as diabetes and dementia from diseases like Alzheimers. Yet, while he recognizes that strict diet regimes don't work, he doesn't apply the same logic to other actions, namely exercise. Attia admits he has issues with being a data geek and an obsessive perfectionist, which probably explains all of this.

The author almost entirely ignores larger societal issues that make the problems of health difficult for any individual to overcome, particularly Americans and their excellent, but expensive and inaccessible healthcare. He discusses vehicular death as a problem we address with regulation and even admits to seeing the effects of gun violence in his time as an intern but only in the last chapter discusses mental health (an astounding number of gun deaths are suicides). In Canada we struggle to find a family physician never mind the sports medicine specialist, family practitioner, nutritionist, physiotherapist, sleep specialist, mental health therapist, and physical trainer you would be required to follow this, albeit sound and sage advice. His advice to practice "rucking", by walking an hour a day with weights in a backpack is particularly galling to me. Buddy, get rid of your car and try living any given day taking transit, walking or biking without your beloved "rucking". His blindness to all of these issues and concerns was highlighted to me by the increasingly simple health advice some journalists and activists are beginning to report.

The 7-minute workout and Michael Pollan's maxim to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.", are perfect examples. This morning on the Guardian Website I read this even simpler distillation of what we can all do to live better, healthier and longer lives:

The eight health measures named by the American Heart Association:

1. Eat a healthy diet
2. Be more active
3. Quit smoking
4. Get healthy sleep
5. Maintain a healthy weight
6. Control cholesterol
7. Watch blood sugar
8. Manage blood pressure

Read more »

Fish and chips of the Magi 

It's only been a few weeks but I think I finally have gotten the memory of a truly awful meal out of my mouth. Though to be safe I ought not think of it. It was a lovely snowy day, that turned into a cold damp night when we had thought to go out for a meal after a long-ish walk. The light wet snow was turning into rain. We were both getting hungry. Julia asked what I was looking for and only one thing came to mind: fish and chips from Allen's restaurant. Initially we thought to take the subway but the nearby station suddenly closed due to a medical emergency. Each bus that passed was packed full and offered no respite. While I was game to walk the 20 minutes or so to Allen's, Julia, whose ill-fitting winter boots were failing her, was growing tired. Thus here we were. I didn't want to ask Julia to keep walking in wet soggy boots and Julia wanted to fulfill my wish for fish and chips. The closest place was a sports pub that had been there for ages but with the notion that perhaps it was under new management we ventured forth.

Don't trust a restaurant that greets you with a potpourri of old cigarettes, stale beer, urinal puck and burned cooking oil. The cigarette smell was particularly odd as there hasn't been smoking in Ontario restaurants for over 20 years. In any case, let's just say the place with multiple screens showing a variety of sporting events (basketball, football and golf), was immediately without charms. I noticed a young lad, maybe nine or ten-years-old, ask his father if he could go to the bathroom and I was alarmed when the adult answered, "Yeah sure, you know where it is." So, this guy regularly took his son to this forsaken spot? Admittedly, this scene made me think, "Well, if you come back here, maybe it's better than I assume." Thus we sat down, Julia ordered a burger and I ordered the fish and chips.

What arrived was passably "food" and even though the burger was edible, the wet "from freezer to fryer" fish I had, was not. Normally I would give it that old college try, or out of an abundance of politeness, at least make it look like I tried, but it was entirely inedible and out of caution, I didn't go beyond the first explorations. The sides of tartar sauce and coleslaw were, I think, passed due, expired, gone off. What was I even looking at? I won't go into detail but needless to say, inflationary pressures aside, this was not what an $18 plate of food should look, smell or taste like. In fact, I'm still a little mad that we paid for it. Someone, in that kitchen, is going to kill someone one day. I'm not joking. There is no way in which that meal seemed safe to eat. Normally, I'm the guy who wants burgers made on the greasiest of grills. The more miles on that grill, the better. Give me fat and salt and I am happy, but this was really the straw that broke the camel's back.

Read more »

Where has all the chocolate gone? 

I'm not addicted – I don't sweat, shake and vomit like Jamie Foxx trying to impress the academy members when I don't get my fix.

I am not prone to substance abuse or addiction. I assume that is mostly some luck of genetics, nurturing, brain chemistry and simply being too lazy to commit to something that generally sounds exhausting. I do however, have a mighty powerful hankerin' for chocolate but now, all the chocolate  is gone.

During the holidays there was a surplus of chocolate. So so so so so much chocolate. At some point I worried if I could "catch" diabetes from chocolate, then realized that is ridiculous and you can only catch diabetes from a diabetic. I was also concerned that chocolate was bad for my teeth. I did away with this worry by following some solid dental hygiene practices. It may have crossed my mind about weight gain, but let's be honest, that's never stopped me before.

Read more »

T'is Still the Season 

Baking is always a part of the holidays and this year I baked a couple of pound cakes (one to share for Mike to finish with marzipan and glaze and one for myself) and some bread. The pound cake turned out great and I think the reason was really just the amount of whipping I did when making the batter. At least so says founder and owner of Milk Bar, Christina Tosi. Tosi's point being you can't really play with the ratios of ingredients in baking but how you handle them makes a difference, like whipping more air into a batter.

On the other hand, I hadn't baked much bread lately because I was avoiding bread, gluten and carbs. I have to admit after avoiding gluten and dairy for almost eight months I couldn't see any big difference in my health. I could still avoid the carbs but I'm not sure I have the problems with gluten that others have so, basically, here comes the bread! Baking bread is fun. I use a pretty simple and forgiving recipe so it's easy to imagine playing with it by adding seeds or nuts, or even things like olives or sun-dried tomatoes. A lot of people took up baking bread over 2020, whereas I sort of stopped, but I think this year I might get back to it.

The Smell of a Potato

A slightly prettier table spread from Food52 

It hit me by surprise. A combination of smells that transported me through time. That’s how smell works though isn’t it. It’s actually kind of hard to just close your eyes and think of a smell that would take you back to when you last experienced it without actually smelling it. When it happens, the clarity of the memory is so evocative it may trigger all sorts of emotions and tremors in your body. For me it was a baked potato that I had just taken off the grill, cut into and stuffed with a pad of butter. This was paired with a sweet BBQ sauce on pork. The entire meal was improvised and put together quickly. I had decided to bake the potato but didn’t have the energy to do much more. I don’t often grill pork chops and lacking imagination I grabbed a little used bottle of Diana Barbecue sauce. As I absorbed the odours, it was as if the world paused for a moment while my brain took in the flicker of images, sounds and senses from probably forty years ago.

Read more »

Cooking With Wine 

Image via Food52 because they take way better photos than I ever could.

It was a typical Saturday. I started with a big leisurely breakfast accompanied by a bowl-sized cup of latte. Then I went out to get some stuff I needed (I don’t know if I’m getting clumsier with age or if I’m drinking too much but I needed to replace some glassware), renew my library card and pick up some groceries. At some point I ended up in the Dollar Store and was side tracked wandering the aisles like it was some minor museum to our glut of consumerism and disposable culture. All that crap made me wonder what if I had designed something that ended up in those aisles, would I be proud or humbled? Probably both.

It was a warm day so I planned to get in a run, actually outdoors instead of a monotonous tread mill run where you stare out the window or watch TV. True to form I left it to the last minutes of daylight. I love running in the last light of the day, when the sky becomes darkening blue and the warm lights of houses and shops are starting to glow. By the time I got back, entered my data (workouts without data are dead to me) and had a shower it was getting late. How did that happen? I suppose the time dwelling over the second cup of coffee in the morning, perusing the wares at the Dollar Store or chatting up the attractive and attentive young librarian all added up. This meant I was running out of time to make the ragù I wanted for supper, which could take almost 2 hours to make.

I decided to push on, with the help of a glass of wine or two. After opening the bottle I realized I still needed a couple of ingredients. The wine needed to breath anyway so I ran over to the grocery store across the street. When I finally started cooking and chopping and prepping it was 7pm. I figure that’s okay, I’ll have some wine, listen to some music, sketch, flip through some magazines and sip some more wine, surf the Net, whatever. At some point I just forgot about cooking entirely. I had gone through half the wine, snacked on a row of crackers, and generally whiled away the time doing not much of anything. This meant the sauce, left to bubble and reduce, turned out absolutely fantastic. It is definitely the best thing I’ve made in a long time. Originally I thought about adding a drop of wine to the sauce but it turns out adding wine to a glass is a much better way to make a great sauce.

Learning to Eat on A Bicycle

There's a lesson I learned a few years ago that I've only slowly started to practice. When I started going on longer rides I tried jamming protein bars down my gullet to power through. Eventually I learned to drink before I was thirsty and eat before I was hungry. In these days of bike computers and calorie trackers it was easy enough to know that you should take a snack every hour or 500 calories expended whichever came first. In time I also found that rather than try downing an entire power bar it was easier on my stomach and more efficient to just take a bite occasionally. When I grew tired of the bars (no amount of sugar or flavouring can cover the chalky taste of the whey and soya protein) I started packing bite sized sandwiches and snacks and casually snacking throughout the entire 4 or 5 hour ride.
Read more »

Important Life Skill

For some reason I always refused to ever look up how to poach an egg. I guess because of its simplicity — how hard could it be? For years I believed the trick to be threefold: a teaspoon of vinegar, a swirling vortex and a portion of luck. Then one morning I accidentally turned off the wrong burner which reduced my pot of boiling water to a simmer, which made all the difference. I dropped the egg in and it formed perfectly. No vinegar or luck required. It still helps to make a swirl though and the little pre-boil trick mentioned in this video is a good one.

I maintain that the design process is a bit like perfectly poaching an egg. Everyone thinks it's easy and they can do it until they try it and inevitably screw it up. Design, like the poached egg, takes a soft touch, some slight of hand, experience, knowledge, a lot of energy and most critically, timing. Knowing when it's done is a skill in its own right. For chefs, the egg itself is a myriad of quandaries and complexities that takes skill and time to master (despite the now fool proof sous vide technique). Of course, people who don't understand the metaphor are probably people who don't understand metaphors. That's a problem for another day.

By the way, whenever I'm in St. John's and I poach an egg, my mother insists I use the 50-year old aluminum poacher — I used it once and the eggs stuck to the metal and tasted more of aluminum than egg. The bigger challenge in this kitchen has been the absence of a slotted spoon. How does a kitchen with a junk drawer full of all manner of tortuous looking pieces of equipment not have a slotted spoon? It's a true kitchen mystery.

Chocked Full o' Nuts 

It's that time of year when chestnuts appear in grocery stores here in T.O. From now until early January they should be good (i.e. not mouldy or dried out etc.) For whatever reason the best ones seem to come from Italy. There's something kind of romantic about chestnuts that I love. They've got history and tradition. As far back as the 18^th century, a hot chestnut falling into a pair britches caused a calamitous episode in The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Victorians seemed to take roasted chestnuts on winter walks, and in 1940s, movie characters warmed their hands at a street vendor's stove while buying a small bag to snack on. They're mentioned in seasonal songs, and in the fall squirrels shake them from trees onto unsuspecting passersby. Here in Toronto some neighbourhoods are thick with chestnut trees and when the chestnuts fall to the street, the mashed nuts make a slippery obstacle for the cyclist to avoid.

Like hot chocolate, roasted chestnuts are a perfect match for autumn and winter. I've never soaked them in water before like the video above mentions but I'll try it on the batch I just bought. I don't know why, but I find if I buy and keep them at home too long they seem to dry out too quickly so I usually only buy enough for a couple of snacks. It's particularly nice on a cold evening to place warm chestnuts in a bowl and keep them in your lap almost like the way people used to carry a couple of hot chestnuts to keep their hands and pockets warm on a frosty walk through an icy dark night.

Oh My Darling, Clementine 

Image via Julian Merrow-Smith

In my youth, the idea of eating a clementine before the first Sunday of Advent seemed not only impossible but heresy. I have no idea of the traditional harvesting of this fruit but they really only used to appear in stores late in November and be gone again by January. The fact that they usually came from North Africa - Morocco or Algeria, only added to their exotic nature and lent themselves perfectly to a Christmas narrative. The anachronistic wooden crates and stapled labels which looked like they were straight from the 1950s enhanced the specialness of clementines. I suppose I was indulging in some early fetishistic and infantile version of orientalism. By eating a clementine I might have been like a junior Marco Polo, glibly tossing away the peel of this golden fruit from a far away land as though it was so common for an explorer such as myself to eat such a fantastical thing. Like anything strongly associated with a particular holiday, the idea of it existing outside of that time of year has a certain absurdity to it. A Christmas tree in July seemed as crazy as wearing shorts while playing pond hockey. Inconceivable.

Of course, for years you’ve been able to get clementines almost anytime of year, regardless of the absurdity. It’s a perfectly reasonable snack. The flavour punch of citrus, the self-containment of the easy to remove peel, the seedless variety being so consumable and the small size of the fruit makes it perfect for kids. Small size is important for me. Like grapes, you could have one, two or handful and not worry about the rest of the batch spoiling. Modular food. Have as much or little as you like. Despite all of that going for clementines, I resisted buying them outside of November or December. Watermelon in the summer is special, in January it feels like, well, a melon. I felt the same for clementines.

Yet here we are, not even out of October when baseball playoffs are in full sprint, leaves have changed, Halloween costumes are being postulated (Donald Trump’s cap may be this year’s winner), pumpkin-spice flavouring is ruining every imaginable food and I’ve already finished my first net bag’s worth of clementines. First things first: net bags? Clementines should be sold in crates with a surprise mouldy lumpen mass found hidden amongst the rest, not in an un-recyclable mesh bag that looks like it belongs in a school gymnasium equipment room. Alright, so the bag works better and reveals any hidden putrid fruit, but where’s the charm? I guess the charm is you aren’t left with an unusable box with rusty staples sticking out.

I think I surrendered to this new age of clementines because I looked around and had a choice of South African oranges, mealy MacIntosh apples, organic Kiwi’s from New Zealand, Peruvian grapes and thought the clementine is a perfect alternative to all of that. Fresh, affordable, peel-able, portable and tasty. I gave in and tossed away my Christmas sentimentality and nostalgia for practical and nutritious. Also, I thought it might be a little crazy and borderline mental illness hanging on to a quaint childhood notion that one fruit must be reserved for two months of the year, not because of its cultivation but because my mom used to put clementines in our Christmas stocking as a treat.

If you think a tiny orange in a sock is a treat, maybe you are crazy.

Where Office Coffee Comes From 

Image via NPR

Blue whale carcasses that were recovered from Newfoundland's West coast are now in Trenton, Ontario being cleaned by the Royal Ontario Museum biodiversity team for future reconstruction and possible display. Interestingly, one step in cleaning the bones is to bury them in a large compost pile. Once this process is complete in about a year, the whale bones will be removed from the compost bin (a converted shipping container) for further cleaning and the remaining compost consisting of manure, sawdust and a bit of decomposing whale flesh will be packaged and distributed to be made into coffee for your office.

At least I'm pretty sure that's what my office's coffee tastes like.

Bread and Butter 

Pumpkin Pie, Thanksgiving 2014 via instagram

This is the time, the very best time of the year to me at least. This was a strange weekend. I think this is the first weekend in a long time when I didn’t rush anywhere or have anything specific to do or see which I admit is the complete opposite for most everyone else. I had planned to do a lot but it just didn’t happen. I did my chores around the house I had to do. Did my shopping, did my cleaning up, more unpacking and so on, but I don’t think I saw anyone I knew. This was also a first. I don't recall many Thanksgivings spent solo. That didn't stop me from cooking like I was surrounded by hoards. When I wasn’t lying with a heating pad on my head fighting a very nasty migraine, I was cooking or baking. I made bread, I made a pie and I made a big ol’ fashioned pot roast. Then I ate to my heart’s content.

One odd thing I did this weekend, as the weather has finally “turned” here, was configure the house thermostats. It’s funny but you can see how the previous owners lives were so different than mine just by the thermostat settings. On these controls, essentially one for every floor, you have to set the times for 1) when you get up, 2) when you leave the house, 3) when you return home and 4) when you go to bed. Clearly the previous owners were morning people; early to bed and early to rise. Most of their settings are about 2-3 hours ahead of what I needed, which explains how the heat had come on and gone off before I was even up in the morning and the heat shut off about two hours before I’m even thinking about bed.

Waking up to a cold house that stretches and yawns itself to life is a very autumnal thing which you don’t have in the summer. It’s one of those things I hate (a cold house) and love (the feeling of house that is warming up). The bread I baked this weekend was the first time since, I don’t when, March maybe, and the smell of fresh baked bread and heat of the oven felt a little like a christening for this house. There’s an old tradition when you visit someone in a new home you bring salt and a loaf of bread – presumably staples that every house should have. Now this place finally has both.

Photos of Food I Ate (before I ate it) 

“I ate alone while watching Netflix on my laptop”

For a certain Generation, “I Am Here” could very well be their motto. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, or Twitter, for some people, exclaiming, “I am here with someone doing something" has become an almost reflex reaction to any experience.

Photographing a meal and sharing that picture on your social networks quickly went from trend to cliché. Yet people still do it. Some genuinely wish to commemorate the occasion or capture the moment to try and recreate it later while others seem to be engaging in a kind of competition of who's-having-more-fun braggadocio. Or sometimes it's just fun to talk about what you did that day and sometimes that thing is an extraordinary meal.
Read more »

And They Said it Couldn't Be Done 

Guggenheim Museum, modelled in icing, gingerbread, cotton candy, candy wrappers, licorice, sugar.

I'm pretty sure I had this idea first, which only goes to show, ideas are cheap, actions are money.

Food artists Caitlin Levin and Henry Hargreaves have beautifully crafted these amazing candy land versions of world famous Modern museums.

I still don't see a Farnsworth House or Philip Johnson's Glass House so I'm assuming they are still up for grabs. I call dibs - AND I get to lick the spoon!

Know Your Joe

Mr. White likes his joe the way he likes his storyline: Black

Now that the Atlantic has posted How to Make Perfect Coffee, I have to say I feel vindicated. I have to say that because saying, "I told you so" is impolite and inappropriate. The article uses some jargony jargon and names golden ratios and some neat sciencey sounding tools but the short take away is you can make great coffee by following some common sense rules:

• Use good, recently roasted whole bean coffee
• Store properly
• Grind just before brewing, preferably in a burr grinder
• Choose the correct grind to suit your method of choice
• Use the right coffee to water ratio
• Use the right temperature of water

Probably the only thing I don't really do on that list is know the temperature of the water - I boil it, I pour it (I use a French press so I pour enough to cover the coffee first, then wait, top up, stir, wait, plunge). Sometimes I wait too long to pour it and I guess I'm usually pouring it too soon. Another thing I've been saying for years is that I prefer light-roast to dark-roast and as such I won't drink a Starbucks coffee because it essentially tastes burnt (also known as "terrible). A couple of years ago I saw a documentary wherein a panel of coffee experts chose Ethopian Yirgacheffe as the best coffee in the world. I gasped the gasp of pride. That's been my staple for years (and oddly the only light-roast my local coffee shop sold). In the words of the fictional Tracy Jordan, I hate to say, "I told you so", so… "Welcome to Miami!"

I say all this on the eve of heading to St. John's where no one troubles too much about coffee so I'll have to make do somehow without packing my grinder, beans and press.

Meat Sweats

I've been travelling this week for work and staying in Leicester Square so I've been eating exclusively Asian food for the last few days. But tonight, tonight is all about meat as a group of us from the office will be eating at Gaucho, London. The odd thing is, I'm 99% sure, I ate here a couple of years ago. My memory, fogged by pints of beer, is a little unreliable, but judging by Google Street View this is the same place. I'll only know for sure once I step inside. Unfortunately, Street View doesn't go inside restaurants.

UPDATE: Gaucho is definitely in the neighbourhood of a consultant's office (which was very close by) but this was definitely not the same place. All the cuts they offered were first shown then explained and an assortment of sides were brought with the mains. Great place and we had a great time.

Freight

Typical grocery run and what I can fit in either a couple of panniers or my Burley bike trailer. Click on the photo to view larger.

$118 worth of groceries. This usually takes a two or three hours out of a Saturday or maybe spread over Saturday and Sunday. Rain or shine. What follows is what you see in the photo:
Read more »

On the Cusp of Something 

Firstly, let me say that it was a gorgeous day. Clear sky overhead and beautifully bright, sunny, and warm. It felt more like an invigorating Spring day – like school was out, kind of day. Unbelievable for the second week of February. Secondly, I have had far worse days. Still, this day did not start nor did it end like a champion. I awoke with my customary quick but satisfying breakfast and then immediately discovered the fifth dead mouse I've found in less than six weeks. To be clear, I found it dead in a trap I set, so I guess I was asking for that. If you don't like disposing of dead bodies, then don't set traps, as the ancient Roman expression goes (I think or maybe that was a Russell Crowe movie?)

“…like a baby chimp just emptied a diaper load à la Jackson Pollock all over your kitchen.”

The day was never going to be a winner at any rate. I had a dentist appointment to drill out an old filling because an x-ray of a rear bicuspid had shown decay behind it, so I had that to look forward to. After a hectic work day (clicking and typing through a modest lunch at my desk, as per usual), I set off thinking, well at least I get a bike ride out of this (on a nicer bike, on another bike yesterday, my chain broke, only the second time in some 30 years I've had that particular malady). Mind you, on the way to the dentist's, I passed an accident; one car had t-boned another. The ambulance was loading someone and the fire and police departments had closed the intersection. Clearly somebody was having a much worse day than me. That cheered me up a little.

One hour of mouth-wide-open later, a small woman had drilled a hole in my head and patched it dutifully telling me that hopefully we had avoided a root canal. In fact, in her opinion, it should be fine (as long as I flossed. Sorry sister, I'm not flossing tonight) because the nerve casing seems to have receded from calcification, due to my age. Great. I'm staring down 44, I've packed on some weight, lost some hair (more than some), but because my nerve endings are calcifying I might be able to avoid expensive and painful dental procedures. Rotting teeth always feels like an old person thing.

By the time I got home, I was starving but in no mood to eat (half of my face was still frozen) so I decided I'd make my new go-to quick recipe; black bean soup.

Black Bean Soup

Dice and cook an onion (red preferred)

Add minced garlic

Add a can of black beans, 1/2 tablespoon of chilli powder (plus some other chillies if you like), add salt and pepper to taste

Add 2 cups of soup stock (I use miso paste for everything because it's so simple)

Simmer for 15 minutes

Remove about half of the soup into a blender. Purée. Add back to remaining soup.

Finish with juice of a lime

Garnish with yogurt or sour cream and coriander.

At most this takes 20-25 minutes, including chopping time and is a great hearty soup.

I transferred the soup to the blender thinking this soup will cure what ails me. Blender cap on, blender plugged in, go.

In an explosion of hot soup, my day was punctuated. My hand was scalded, and puréed soup was running down the cupboards and over the counter. If you can't imagine what sprayed black bean soup looks like, let me enlighten you. It looks like a baby chimp just emptied a diaper load à la Jackson Pollock all over your kitchen. Yeah. Fecal Abstract Expressionism. The really weird thing was the lid never came off the blender. All that soup had essentially squirted through the necessary yet very small air holes in the lid (where the little cap comes off for adding more liquid INTO the blender). Dumbfounded I cleaned up the mess, salvaged what was left and retired to the couch. As a topper, when I was doing the dishes, I dropped the tea towel into the full sink. I had to dry the dishes with cloth table napkins. All of this left me thinking, Hu-effing-rrah. After broken bike chains, dead mice, dental drillings and soup volcanoes, tomorrow has to be better. Plus, it is Friday after all. As a wise man once said, "Wake me when it's quittin' time."